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Monday, February 22, 2010

Asterisks on a balance sheet

This is the newspaper I grew up with.

The State-Times was the afternoon paper in Baton Rouge. I worked there once upon a time, on the copy desk. Before that, I got my byline in there a few times as an "LSU student writer" and a freelancer.

In 1991, the State-Times died. Newspapers, you see, don't have going out of business sales. They don't close. They die.

Since 2001 -- 10 years after my newspaper died -- there's been a lot more death (carnage, actually) in the newspaper business. Not only have newspapers died, countless thousands of careers have been killed even at the papers that -- technically -- are "survivors" of the bloodbath that is paradigm change.

A story in the MediaDailyNews newsletter notes that, since 2001, the newspaper industry has shed 105,000 jobs -- 9,700 of them in newsrooms across the land.

ENVISION it this way: This is the first job lost at a newspaper nine years ago.

AND THESE ARE all the jobs lost at American newspapers subsequently. One asterisk = one job:

REMEMBER that each asterisk is a newspaper job -- production, support staff, advertising, circulation and newsroom -- that's gone forever. And that many, many, manyof the almost 10,000 "asterisks" who were print journalists never will be that again.

Remember that thousands of these "asterisks" -- likely many tens of thousands of these "asterisks" -- represent lives and families upended by unemployment and the prospect of forever-diminished earnings.

Remember that while something surely will come along to replace newspaper journalism, it won't come in time to help a great number of these "asterisks."

And remember that a lot of things that you need to know will remain unknown to you for a good, long while . . . all because the "asterisks" you counted upon for that knowledge have gone missing.